Diverse working-class neighborhoods made a young Iraqi refugee feel she belonged

Evidence

In Hyattsville almost everyone had been black, and “you fit in everywhere because black people see past everything,” she told me. To her, Hyattsville was a place where everyone was friendly, where all the kids played together, lived together, and were educated together. Her friends and neighbors “didn’t look at you like you have a different skin color or different hair or skin tone or anything,” she said. When her young Hyattsville friends discovered that she was Muslim, they would joke with her about eating bean pie. She had never seen, let alone tasted, a bean pie, but she knew they were making some kind of reference to Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, and the mythical bean pie made her feel like she belonged. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 595

Categorization

• SEED: The bean pie as a marker of social inclusion for a Muslim immigrant in a Black neighborhood — a concrete micro-ethnographic anecdote on how outsiders get folded in through affectionate stereotype, not excluded by it.